Wednesday, February 3, 2016

"I'd like to be able to tell you everything I'm thinking. But I can't." - Kate Mercer

Hand covering my lips the shape of a faded "nooo", the end credits began. Great, another film to add to my ever-growing list of shattered dreams. I should know by now that I have a wretched magnetism towards these sorts.

I'm going to keep this short and running, because this is not a movie review blog, and I'm trying not to let perfectionism keep me from making a comeback on my whatever blog, which I refuse to let die.

The character of Kate was just too real for me. I empathized so hard with her, having experienced analogous trauma - well, I'm not nearly in my sixties celebrating my 45th wedding anniversary, but I have had my own Jeff, a happy-go-lucky, foolish, it's-possible-to-move-on-from-anything Jeff, my and Kate's antithesis. In honesty, I had my hunches midway through that it was not going to end well for the characters,but a part of me was wishing that filmmakers were not like me. Not emo, and not hardcore realists. Unfortunately, I am not so unique. They also just had to make my favorite sad song the climatic soundtrack of this movie. #SmokeGetsInYourEyes #ThePlatters #heartbreaksintoamillionmorepieces #THANKS

FEEL MY PAIN

What struck me the most about how Kate's character was portrayed, and why this movie and Charlotte Rampling are deserving of gold at the upcoming, most important movie awards ceremony, were the nuances and layering of her reaction to even just an emotional existence of another woman in her husband's life. Rather than large and dramatic episodes of Kate feeling explicitly sorry for herself and angry at Jeff, you see her make all the efforts to maintain order, but ultimately succumbing to the inability to. Without making a huge scene.

Because women who are introverted, passionately loving but grudgeful perfectionists are religiously against crumbling. What you need to see, which you do in this movie, are us trying to convince ourselves to insanity not to snoop, trying to create more memorabilias of our relationship out of low confidence, knowing too much but keeping the burden locked up from anyone else, seeing "her" in everyday things we don't want near our men, mentally calculating the years we've wasted, and smiling for everyone all the while.